AI orientation instead of hype for tourism

Roman Egger and feratel launch ‘feratelAIplus Compass’

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing tourism: new decision-making logic, changing guest expectations and shifting digital role models. To provide guidance in this area, Prof. Roman Egger and feratel media technologies AG are launching the monthly webinar series ‘feratelAIplus Compass’. The aim is to enable tourism organisations to classify, evaluate and make strategic decisions about AI, deliberately without product demos or short-term tool recommendations.

Egger, who has been a professor of tourism innovation at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences for over 20 years and now at MODUL University Vienna, contributes strategic AI knowledge from research and teaching. feratel, as the technology partner in tourism, provides fundamental system expertise in destination management, guest cards, apps, registration systems and much more, as well as data from hundreds of destinations. ‘AI must move from the laboratory into practice. The compass helps tourism decision-makers to distinguish between what is feasible and what is wishful thinking,’ explains Egger.

Strategic partnership for tourism

Both partners pursue a common goal: to use AI strategically and responsibly. Egger provides conceptual depth, while feratelAIplus combines this with productive systems and product solutions as well as market experience. The cooperation goes beyond webinars, as Egger's AI expertise flows directly into product development.

feratelAIplus: AI already productive

With feratelAIplus, feratel, Onlim, pixelpoint & dataCycle and Intermaps are combining their strengths in data intelligence, conversational AI and system integration. AI-based voicebots are already in use, automatically answering frequent queries, available around the clock in multiple languages, and gradually being expanded into comprehensive tourism voice assistants for bookings, events, routes & tours, POIs, FAQs, ski resort information and more.

AI services are already being used productively and automatically in the Deskline destination management system: They translate texts, create image descriptions and assist with content maintenance. The calculations of market development forecasts in the Performance Monitor are also carried out individually for each DMO with AI support. This is based on a central, quality-assured data pool with information on accommodation, events, weather, mobility, prices, lifts and slopes, routes and tours, and much more.

‘For AI to function reliably in tourism, structured data and innovative technologies are needed to translate this information into understandable answers,’ is the claim of Egger and feratel. This is precisely where the collaboration comes in: AI should not experiment, but work and, above all, noticeably relieve the burden on tourism professionals.


Last updated on 26.01.2026

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